The MATHEMATICA® software system available from Wolfram Research, Inc. is a powerful computational tool that can evaluate general symbolic expressions, as well as mathematical and numeric expressions. MATHEMATICA® is an interpreted language, with a notion of “evaluation” of symbolic expressions. Evaluation consists in applying to any symbolic expression all transformation rules that fit that expression.
In the MATHEMATICA® software system, a user can create interactive electronic documents referred to as “notebooks.” Various expressions, including numeric and symbolic expressions, can be entered into a notebook via a keyboard, for example, and a user can cause the expression to be evaluated. As a simple example, a user could first set a function ƒ equal to x2 by typing “f=x^2” and then pressing “Enter” while holding down the “Shift” key (i.e., “hitting Shift-Enter”). Then, the user could have the MATHEMATICA® software system evaluate the integral off with respect to x by typing “integral[f,x]” and then hitting Shift-Enter. Of course, the MATHEMATICA® software system permits users to evaluate much more complex expressions and to analyze complex mathematical and scientific problems.
Input to the MATHEMATICA® software system must be in a particular syntax or MATHEMATICA® will not recognize what the user intended. For example, if a user wants to utilize a built-in function of the MATHEMATICA® software system, such as the function “integral”, the user must correctly type in the word “integral.” Additionally, the expression that is to be integrated must be included within brackets subsequent to the word “integral”. For example, to evaluate the integral of ƒ with respect to x, the text “integral[f,x]” must be typed. If the correct syntax is not followed exactly, the MATHEMATICA® software system will not recognize what the user had intended. For example, if a built-in function or a user-defined function is misspelled, MATHEMATICA® will not recognize that the user intended to use the function. Similarly, if a bracket, comma, parentheses, etc. is erroneously omitted or misplaced, MATHEMATICA® will not recognize what the user intended.
Various currently available on-line calculators utilize formulas to generate numerical results based on user-provided parameters. As an example, a website may provide a mortgage payment calculator that uses a mathematical formula to calculate a monthly mortgage payment based on various parameters such as a mortgage amount and an interest rate. A user can input values of the parameters by typing numbers into various text boxes on the web page. For example, the user can input a mortgage amount, an interest rate, number of years, etc. Then, the user can select a “Calculate” button on the web page to generate a mortgage payment, which is presented to the user via a different web page.
Search engines, such as Internet search engines, have been in use for some time. Such search engines permit the user to form a search query using combinations of keywords to search through a web page database containing text indices associated with one or more distinct web pages. The search engine looks for matches between the search query and text indices in the web page database, and then returns a number of hits which correspond to URL pointers and text excerpts from the web pages that represent the closest matches.
Some Internet search engines analyze the context of keywords in order to narrow the number of matches. For example, if a search query includes the words “yellow” and “pages,” a search engine may recognize that the phrase “yellow pages” has a particular meaning and it may therefore note that web pages including the phrase “yellow pages” may be a closer match than web pages merely containing the word “yellow” and/or the word “pages.”
Some application programs, for example, a word processor, may have a help tool that allows a user to enter a word or phrase and will display help topics containing that word or phrase, from which the user can make a selection.